End-users always have a hard time finding information on a Web site because prior access methods cannot handle the quantity of information or the level of detail. The basis for this problem lies in the underlying technology used to organize or find information. The search engine, the most popular method, matches user supplied words against text in server files or keywords in a database system. However, problems with word matching techniques are well known and include the retrieval of numerous irrelevant "hits" or, worse yet, the missing retrieval of important references simply because the wrong search word was supplied.
To improve end-user access on a Web site, other access methods are used in conjunction with a search engine. These include tables of contents, and more ambitious structures like directory assistance or catalog systems. Unfortunately, each technology has its own set of limitations. For instance, a table of contents only provides a broad overview of a Web site with no specifics, and directory assistance and catalog systems provide detail but they become very difficult to maintain with cross referencing.
The present invention overcomes this end-user access problem on a Web site by referring to methods disclosed by Zellweger (5,530,125 May 13, 1997) to build and manage a content menu. The distinctive advantage of this approach is that the underlying menu structure is designed to handle details and cross references. The menu it produces works like an index in the back of a book where information is ordered by a series of embedded lists. End-users navigate these nested list menus to reach information at the end of a menu path. On a computer these lists go well beyond the physical constraints of a list on a page. There is no limit to the number of items in a content menu lists, and with the open hierarchical data structure, the computer takes care of all the cross references and details.
Zellweger teaches how an interactive authoring system can be used to manage menu data and generate menu data for a content menu on a stand-alone computer. The disclosure also addresses alternative settings such as a client server network but this prior art does not teach how to configure menu data files for an applet running in a client-server setting. The prior art taught how to fetch menu data from a fast storage device. Each time an item was selected from a menu list, new menu list data was retrieved from a storage device on the desktop computer like a hard drive. In a client server network setting, where such traffic can impact a server, this particular program logic is highly inefficient.
More recently, Zellweger (60/046,920) disclosed the way to generate linked hypertext list menus to produce a content menu on a Web site. However, when using hypertext code, list menus look primitive and when they are programmed to track end-user selections limitations inherent in HTML only allow one list menu per file, creating performance bottlenecks by requiring more network traffic than necessary. In order to overcome these technical flaws, the present invention discloses the means to build and maintain a content menu using an applet-based system.
Developers use programming languages like Sun Microsystem's Java to build an applet that runs on a client computer. Applets have distinct advantages over an HTML-based user interface because it has a more windows-like appearance, and an applet running on a client machine has the fill power of a programming language, including the ability to employ local variables and open and close files on a server.